Michael works for Virginia Tech (Go Hokies!) and tells everyone he's 80% developer, 20% evangelist for "new and cool stuff." Some of that includes helping Virginia Tech adopt Docker, cloud services, single-page applications, CI/CD pipelines, and other current development practices. He started the Docker Blacksburg Meetup group where he has taught and helped others in southwestern Virginia learn and use Docker. Dogs, not cats.

Blogs

I had the opportunity to be the opening keynote speaker for the Blacksburg Open Source Dev Conference. Attendees were a range of students and local professionals.

This was my first time speaking in the “New Classroom Building” (yes… that’s the name) on the Virginia Tech campus. What made it unique was the speaker platform was in the middle of the room, giving a 360° audience. Interesting, but actually pretty cool!

At Virginia Tech, running a Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform is tough because of the spread of users. Even within our Central IT organization, we have many departments, who almost all act as individual business entities, rather than a single entity with separate parts. That doesn’t even include the other departments and colleges distributed around the university. So, instead of having a centralized ops unit that will run all apps, we are seeking to provide a centralized container hosting platform where we can give as much control back to individual teams as possible. Obviously, this comes with some complexity.

You’ve built a Docker image. Great! It runs. But, not everything is there. Why not? Could it be a bad RUN command? This is the exact scenario I came across recently when helping someone debug an issue with their image builds.